Automatic sod harvesting apparatus have been used for many years by the sod growing industry to more efficiently remove the sod. Self propelled harvesters have been redesigned in an effort to improve production rates, reduce labor costs and improve the quality of removing, severing and handling of the sod pads harvested.
Examples of typical automatic sod harvesters are represented by prior U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,672,452; 3,887,013; 3,590,927 and 2,617,347.
It has long been recognized that labor costs represent a very significant portion of the cost of harvesting the sod and many prior art efforts have been directed to attempts to improve handling of the sod in a manner which reduces the labor requirements.
Typically, the sod strips severed from the ground in these types of harvesters are cut into predetermined lengths to form sod pads. These pads are conveyed rearwardly from the forward cutting head to a loading and/or unloading station.
In the very early models, the sod pads were merely pushed individually onto the ground for later retrieval.
In most modern instances, the sod pads are automatically folded, rolled into a cylindrical configuration or left flat prior to being stacked onto a sod-receiving pallet.
Other versions have tried to automate the stacking of the sod pads onto a pallet, however, at present such configurations have met with little commercial acceptance.
Prior to the present invention, the stacking and pallet unloading operations have been conducted such that the loaded pallet must be removed from the harvester at the rear thereof. The pallets, then, are retrieved by a suitable accessory apparatus, such as a fork lift, for transport and loading to a delivery truck. However, since the loaded pallet is deposited rearwardly and along the line of travel, it is positioned to interfere with the next adjacent pass of the harvester. Therefore, an additional worker is necessary to concurrently operate the lift fork vehicle to remove the loaded pallets from the path of the harvester prior to its next pass through the sod field.